Old Lady and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Mob Grinder




Because I play Vegan Minecraft I don't kill chickens, so I don't get a lot of feathers. Without feathers I can't craft many arrows. Most of the feathers I've gotten have been given to me by my cats. Most of the arrows I've gotten have come from killing skeletons.  I use a lot of arrows, especially in the Nether.

I've watched YouTube videos showing plentiful mobs falling from mob grinders  and I've read articles like "1000 Items of Mob Loot an Hour With This Easy Mob Grinder", and I thought that if I built a mob grinder I could get a lot more arrow drops.

I'm a bit more skeptical now after building my first mob grinder (otherwise known as 'Wombat'*).

I built it following traditional Mob_grinder tutorials. The bottom of the first level is at 107 elevation, and the bottom of the chute is at level 63. I optimistically put in a Redstone-operated closure halfway down the chute so that I could kill stunned-but-not-killed mobs for the XP points. Hah!

Output has been disappointing. I get a steady trickle of string, arrows, zombie flesh, and gunpowder, but not enough arrows to meet my needs.

Skeleton on top of hoppers at bottom of chute.
 I figure that the chute must have been dark enough for him to spawn.


I searched for "Why doesn't my mob grinder work?" Suggestions for reasons mob grinders don't work:

- Too much light. 

- Mob caps - I'm assuming this is for someone who is complaining "I only got 100 drops" - not someone who is getting next to nothing.

- Game difficulty - I'm playing 'normal' difficulty. I find that changing it to Peaceful and back to Normal helps increase the drops for a while. I'm not increasing it to Hard - it's hard enough.

- Unfavorable location - that is, not within 28 to 128 blocks from the player, and
- Too many other dark places for hostile mobs to spawn.


I think this last item, 'too many other dark areas for mobs to spawn'  may be the clue to why it is not working well. I have put up torches everywhere,  but there may still be a few hostile mobs hiding in dark places in the huge cave system under my base. 

I will continue working on alternatives - looking for villagers whose fletcher villagers sell arrows, checking shipwrecks, and clobbering every skeleton I see.

I'm also working on using a skeletons spawner I found.


*WOMBAT is a quilting term referring to 'total waste of time and batting'.

.

Mob Spawner on right side of base. (I'm standing on a pile of gravel to take the photo - not in Creative)

Addendum: I've since gotten a Fletcher Villager in my DIY village, and my arrow supply has increased.

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